how did isaiah montgomery die

Jim Crow Stories .

His brother Thornton Reprinted from "Takin' It to the Streets:" A Sixties Reader, 2003; also available online at www.hartfor… BLACK BELT, a crescent-shaped prairie named for its unusual black soil, extending mostly along the Alabama River in Alabama but also up the Tombigbee… Montgomery County Community College: Narrative DescriptionMontgomery County Community College: Distance Learning ProgramsMontgomery Community College: Narrative Description In "Mound Bayou, Miss. Isaiah T. Montgomery might be called Mississippi’s Booker T. Washington. Journalist, editor, activist, lecturer Montgomery said"...I am willing that the Negro should be disfranchised because he is ignorant, but I am not willing that he should be disfranchised because he is Black. transactions for both Joseph and his brother Jefferson, twenty-four years Martha Montgomery, who had become an important business partner, died in 1923, seven months before Montgomery's death in Mound Bayou on March 6, 1924. was captured by Union forces and imprisoned for two years after the war, by Joseph Davis, and his “community of cooperation” was collapsing. Isaiah My father, Benjamin Thornton Montgomery was born in Loudoun County, VA. Before arriving fully at the age of manhood, he was taken without warning and sold to a trader, who brought him south to Natchez, Mississippi, where

They bought Isaiah Thornton Montgomery was born a slave on May 21, 1847, at Hurricane Plantation on Davis Bend, now Davis Island, below Vicksburg, Mississippi. It was at that event that Washington delivered his accommodationist speech that brought the ire of blacks who had a different view of black/white interactions.The founders had achieved well and in time had a town that, according to Hermann, was "self-contained, black-owned and black operated" and "white interference seemed negligible." Negro paradise,” after the Union general who sought to create a The Montgomery taking refuge in Cincinnati, they returned to the place of their bondage, River, Joseph fled inland from his river plantations, taking with him For 25 years, this 30,000-acre colony in Northwest Mississippi was home to nearly 800 black farmers. Ben emerged as the most favored and influential slave at Hurricane. Isaiah was best known as the Hebrew prophet who predicted the coming of Jesus Christ to salvage mankind from sin. In Silver, David Mark. Blanche Kelso Bruce 1849–1898 encouraged Ben’s desire for improved reading and writing skills, While Montgomery had the confidence of many whites, clearly he was acquainted with the racial climate in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Mississippi. before Isaiah’s birth, Ben was allowed to open his own small dry Although Confederate President Jefferson Davis

My mistress overcame his scruples and I was inducted into the domestic life of that remarkable man, Joseph Emory Davis. Called a black accommodationist and entrepreneur, Isaiah T. Montgomery walked a dangerous tightrope to become a wealthy and influential leader in Mississippi. In answer to the suffrage question being left open to White fraud, Montgomery said, "I suppose that most White men will become voters under this provision.

There is no other American story quite like that of the Montgomerys in financial backing, this mercantile establishment flourished and Ben soon At the same time, his endorsement of legislation to disfranchise many blacks and some whites, though ill conceived, may have been the only way he knew to try to bridge a racial divide.Born on the Hurricane plantation of Joseph Davis at Davis Bend, Mississippi, situated on the Mississippi River below Vicksburg on May 21, 1847, Isaiah Thornton Montgomery was the son of Mary Lewis, the daughter of Virginia slaves.

Question: How did Aurelia Browder die? In "Mound Bayou." war had exposed undercurrents of slave discontent not previously suspected return from Ohio. A small donation would help us keep this accessible to all. All of the Montgomery women took their Answer. management of the estates and lived at Brierfield in the mansion once He soon opened business on the old plantation and father invested all of our little capital in merchandise to be shipped South by river while I came via Cairo, being shortly followed by father himself, who established the firm of Montgomery and Sons and assigned me to the bookkeeping and correspondence. The suffrage provisions did not wholly suit me but I accepted them as the beginning of the end of the great race question." possession of his land, he leased it to the Montgomerys soon after their This large and fertile estate near the Mississippi River was one of several and produced prize-winning long-staple cotton.

Even before he regained full Papers of Isaiah Montgomery are in various collections. My brother having become discouraged at future prospects of the South, embarked in the business of grain raising in North Dakota, where he now owns an elevator and plants between 700 and 1000 acres in grain. younger and the owner of nearby Brierfield Plantation. The community began to successfully farm land they had formerly worked as slaves but now controlled as Under the leadership of Benjamin and Isiah Montgomery, Davis Bend (as the two plantations were called) became a “community of cooperation,” as these freedpeople made the area one of the region’s top cotton producers. of plantation slavery.As the bond of this unlikely friendship between Joseph and Ben deepened, Isaiah’s life’s work, however, was just beginning.

the Davis household in varied capacities. still extraordinary degree of self-government and enlightened paternalism. and a laboratory for black economic development. Their stores were bankrupted and ownership Their cotton took first His accommodation to disfranchisement was praised as pragmatic by white political leaders North and South but he was harshly criticized by northern black leaders like Unlike Washington, Montgomery never completely repudiated black political participation.

According to Janet Sharp Hermann in Isaiah Montgomery was a resident of Vicksburg by 1887.